Connect with us

EU

#EAPM: Major personalised medicine conference now only five weeks away

SHARE:

Published

on

We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you've consented to and to improve our understanding of you. You can unsubscribe at any time.

With its upcoming sixth Presidency conference now only five weeks away, the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine is preparing for the ‘Personalised Medicine and the Big Data Challenge’  event in the historic Bibliothèque Solvay, Brussels, on 27-28 March, writes European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) Executive Director Denis Horgan.

Click here to register.

As ever at the conference, high-level speakers and attendees will come from a wide range of stakeholder groups including patients, healthcare professionals, academics, industry representatives, politicians and legislators, the media and more.

The conference comes on the back of EAPM’s involvement in two sets of Council Conclusions in the health arena. These will have an impact on the future of health in general and targeted treatments and earlier diagnoses in particular.

The first of these was the landmark Luxembourg conclusions on access to personalised medicine two years ago. These came about in no small part due to EAPMs influence and involvement, not least at a major conference on the topic at the start of the Luxembourg presidency.

More recently we have had the Council Conclusions on Health in the Digital Society - making progress in data-driven innovation in the field of health, under the auspices of the Estonian presidency which ran until the end of 2017.

Among the opportunities identified both by EAPM and Estonia are those arising from Big Data and improved data analytics capabilities, as well as from personalised medicine, use of clinical decision support systems by health professionals and use of mobile health tools for individuals to manage their own health and chronic conditions.

Advertisement

Topics at the ‘Personalised Medicine and the Big Data Challenge’ conference will include EAPM’s MEGA project, which stands for ‘Million European Genomes Alliance’.

With rising health-care costs and individual health systems being increasingly challenged, genomics has the potential to impact the health of all of us and provide diagnostic, economic and efficiency benefits, ensuring that patients receive the right information and the right treatment at the right time.

This will ease the burden on health-care systems and lead to a healthier and, thus, wealthier, Europe.

The availability of genetic data from a large number of individuals increases the ability to investigate questions across many rare and common diseases and in different populations, and also provides more information for understanding the results for clinical care in a patient.

MEGA aims to form a coalition of the willing member states to work together and reach the million genome figure.

A further session will raise and discuss the topic of ‘Realising the Vision of Personalised Health Care through Big Data’ while another will cover the broad picture of profiling, genomics and personalised health care.

Arguably, information is the main value asset of 21st century. Big Data and digital technologies are here and here to stay, and bring many benefits to the rapidly growing area of eHealth, mHealth, the  treatment of rare diseases and more.

On a wider personalised medicine basis, Europe needs synergies to be realised at member state level, a topic to be discussed at length while specific disease areas, such as haematology and Big Data, will come under the Alliance microscope.

Medical research, clinical trials and more are generating unprecedented amounts of Big Data that is moving treatments forward in many disease areas. However, rare diseases present their own challenges, and in this sense the need for cross-border, pan-European collaboration is greater than anywhere.

Big Data can also be put to excellent use by providing the evidence base for other treatments, not least in neurology, which will be discussed at the conference, alongside public health genomics.

Click here for the current agenda.

Share this article:

EU Reporter publishes articles from a variety of outside sources which express a wide range of viewpoints. The positions taken in these articles are not necessarily those of EU Reporter.

Trending